Levin's 1978 hit holds the record as Broadway’s longest running thriller, but it’s much more than shock and scare. The play within a play about a writer of Broadway thrillers (played here by Bryan Putnam) and his ambitious student (Brendan Carter) is full of enough plot twists to take your head clean off.

“It has a Hitchcock-like suspense to it, where it builds and builds and drops the audience in a place where they least likely thought they’d end up,” said Shane Fernando, who's directing for Thalian Hall's Cube Theatre Productions. “They are constantly questioning every character’s motives, and questioning what they were led to believe for an entire act that gets turned on its head."

The only thing harder than scaring someone is making them laugh, and that’s just the first challenge for Fernando. If you’ve been in the Stein Theatre, you know how intimate it is. Now, picture set designer Gary Ralph Smith fitting in four entrances and a fireplace.

Fernando promises hyper-realistic murders and lots of laughs with Levin's clever, fast-paced script, which is chock full of double entendres, unspoken implications and even a little garrotting.

“There is woven through a constant thread of comedy and comic relief. Because the show does take the audience to some dark places," he said. "So if you can keep murder, suspense and thrills light, the show is successful."

And like all good directors, he’s got a lovely take on this raucous, violent comedy.

“It’s a love story,” Fernando said, “that shows the audience a variety of ways to look at love, whether it’s through a search for true love, a search for power, a search for prestige, a search for a love of success or love of normalcy. And what people will go through to obtain those loves.”